Unified Remote nice app which allows you to control a PC (or a Mac), in my case my laptop using you home network and your phone. Install the app, drop the appropriate file on your PC/Mac and away you go.

In this case, in my home cinema which allowed me to watch an .avi on the big screen with surround sound. It’s on sale this weekend at £0.80, bargain…

I remotely upgraded the firmware on my Synology Diskstation DS214SE this week to version 5 which comes with an interface overhaul as well as updates to all the packages. It all seems to be working well despite British Gas causing no less than 5 power outages whilst installing the new boiler/tank etc according to the log file.

All of which are now fully supported, video & Audi streaming to your phone for the latter two. Obviously they use your DATA allowance up, so I would limit music & video when connected to Wifi only. Essentially you now have mobile access to all files on the NAS regardless of where you are, so a personal dropbox with no nags to link friends for upgrades and so on.

I am testing DS Photo but it’s not very intelligent and wants me to drop batches of file in rather than folder trees. Seeing as they are stored logically and I can access them using DS File, this one will wait for updates before I bother using it in anger. Well, that and the fact I have 12 years of digital photos in 26,309 Files, 285 Folders weighing in at 93 Gig…

Clearly every new phone deserves a new game, mine is Smash Hit which rather neatly encapsulates the point of the game.

Take a surreal journey through an otherworldly dimension, move in harmony with sound and music and smash everything in your path! This experience requires focus, concentration, and timing to not only travel as far as you can, but also break the beautiful glass objects that stand in your way.

Mostly playing with some of the new features with the massively improved Blinkfeed (now available from the play store for all Android users) and the bizare decision to make the clock white in the day and dark in the night, so looks extremely odd alongside Google Play as you can see on the right.

The handset comes with a cover (not that I will use it) and is simply beautiful to look at and makes the plastic Samsung offering look tatty in comparison.

Amazingly there are custom ROMs available already and I will given them a week or two for the early adopters to identify before applying one. This will allow me to remove all the crap I don’t want or use like Twatter, FaceBonk, Goggle+ and so on.

Clearly a Worms variant, but quite amusing nonetheless, and you can play it well enough without paying for gears etc if you work through the single player campaign and upgrade your Bot, not your weapons, which you get as you level up and are dropped throughout the game.

A long title, but a pain to achieve as Windows 8 ADB drivers are different from Vista and Win7. It’s exactly the same process on Vista & Win 7, but impossible on Windows 8 without the drivers linked below..

Jelly Bean on Kindle Fire 2.

So in the correct order:

Install Kindle Fire ADB drivers from this page at XDA and then Root as instructed (Device needs to be rooted to add custom .img files and Boot-loader.). In the same thread:

Carry the steps in the Root Many Android section.

Then Qemu Automated Root.

Follow the Cordless APK Instructions here to install a custom .img file and boot-loader (the excellent TWRP). You need this to install custom ROMs.

Once you have done that lot, you boot up into a standard Jelly Bean environment with out all the Kindle crap and the store with charges more for apps than the Google Play store does. I linked the tablet to the wife’s Gmail account (it’s her tablet), and it promptly sorted her emails and pulled down her Android apps without my intervention…

This is about as straightforward and polished way of working with your Windows PC and you Android tablet or phone I have come across. if they are both on the same wifi network, you can inspect, edit and transfer files between both with ease, as well as sent text messages on your PC using you phone and so on. Impressive stuff…

I’ve had an Android phone for almost 2-years and I have pretty much settled on the software I use on it, I think I have reached the point where it does certain jobs for me and that’s it. In alphabetical order they are:

I have tried quite literally hundred of apps, but these are the ones currently present and worth having, though I would like to find something a little less quirky than ES File Explorer tbh. These are NOT the same as the apps I use on my Android tablet, where there is a considerable divergence due to screen size, chipset (Tegra 3) and ease of use. I’ll cover these another time.